ORIGINAL: Flaviusx
The Lvov opening is good enough that everybody does it. This is not an accident. It's a game changing move and easily accelerates the Axis advance by a month or two.
Without it, SW Front can grind things out down there for quite some time and indeed force AGC to do what they did historically and move Guderian to its rear. I hear a lot of folks talking about the Lvov opening preventing Soviet runaways.
Nonsense. If you're running away to the Dnepr in the absence of a Lvov opening, you've thrown away a great opportunity to slow AGS to a crawl. The running away is what happens as a result of the Lvov opening, so people have got this exactly backwards.
We have previously discussed and proved that your assertion that Lvov is responsible for all the eastward run-away is absolute and utter fallacy. The reason the Soviets are required to run away is because their offensive power is measured in natural log values.
The 1941 army is offensively toothless, despite history. You claim that Lvov is the reason for German early advances. But Lvov has NOTHING to do with Leningrad falling, and Lvov has nothing to do with Minsk and Smolensk falling MONTHS before they historically had.
You have two basic issues: Toothless Soviet offensive capability in 1941's opening 17 turns.
German understanding of the consequence of 1.
Want to prove this? Let's start looking at all the 1941 scenarios people play, in which a Lvov opening is not possible. Explore these, and tell me that Soviets aren't simply delaying by ZOC blankets, falling back in good order, and refusing to attack Germans.
In Road to Kiev/Dnepropetrovsk you will find Germany cannot win, and in Smolensk/Leningrad you will see Robinsky over the first 6 turns, guaranteed.
So Soviet players (me included, I have Soviet games ongoing) know to fall back in a NATO Phased-Defensive-Displacement (invented in the 80s when armored vehicles could move 30 mph over broken terrain) all the way to the Valdai/Rzhev/Moscow/Voronezh/Donets cities. You run until you can condense in the forests, behind the river, and at the spot where your reinforcements have had time to organize, dig in, and wait for Germany to reach the (completely predictable) limit of their supply line.
This is all standard, no-brainer stuff, Flavius.
As is customarily the case, the Sovie-o-phile community wants to say that Soviet High Command could have developed and implemented a doctrine completely anethema to its training doctrine over the previous 20 years (the 1986 NATO defense) based on (insert anecdote of history here); but they discount the possibility that German high command could just as easily have recognized (based on anecdotes from generals' advice) that supply and supply distance were the largest 1941 enemies that they'll face, and improve their supply and rail networks.
No, you can't tolerate Germany doing better than historical in 1941, and you will use any excuse to enforce history against the Germans only.
I find the continued dominance of the Sovie-o-phile play philosophy producing a more limited range of outcomes each time a new version of the game is released.
WitE is a caged hunt designed for a Soviet player to have an optimal army with which to defeat the historical German one.
I repeat again: No one should play Germany against a human opponent.
Boycott Soviet opponents and let them see how much fun they can have playing other Sovie-o-philes.
It is clear that Matrix has no interest in improving the fun-factor of the German side.